Korakrit Arunanondchai: Young Artists 2018

William J. Simmons

Photography by Jason Schmidt

Korakrit Arunanondchai positions his work in terms of a quintessentially postmodern problem: the shifting relationship between bodies and concepts. “I want the audience in my installations to be aware of their physicality in relationship to time—through senses, experiencing inputs like sound, the lighting program, smells, moving liquids, atmospheric fog—while also experiencing the extension of their bodies into a more digital or perhaps immaterial realms as well,” says Arunanondchai. We have reached a moment in art history where the dispersed, digital body has become primary, as opposed to any kind of centeredness on a literal, corporeal body, but Arunanondchai’s work allows us to consider the uncertainties of existing within a post-digital world. “There is a sense of awareness of a physical body while simultaneously being implicated in one that is perhaps atmospheric, spirit-like as well,” he says.

With history in a room filled with people with funny names 4 (garden), 2017. Courtesy of the artist and Clearing.

For example, the Arunanondchai’s Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names 3 places stand-ins for the body in the form of mannequins within a cave-like installation that is reminiscent of video from a colonoscopy. The result is a weird, but somehow familiar set of throbbing, oddly shaped and otherworldly mass of stasis and movement. It is a series of indices of the body, and it is our own body that offers some tentative completion to the narrative. Yet, we are removed once again. Footage of the installation is recorded by a drone and played in our own space. It is as if the Cartesian being has been set into the wilderness of its own creation; with nowhere to find an accurate reflection of the self.